Fern Brady still has the meltdowns which have plagued her life – overwhelming anxiety which she masks until she gets behind closed doors, kicking furniture, smashing ornaments, punching walls.
“I’ll always have a sensory system that is wired differently; where a light touch makes me want to scratch my skin off, sudden noises cause me pain and fluorescent light feels like it’s sucking the life out of me,” the stand-up comedian and TV’s Taskmaster contestant writes in her new book, Strong Female Character, in which she charts living with autism.
Brady was only diagnosed in 2021. She pursued an assessment following a gig in Berlin in 2017, where Brady joked onstage that she didn’t fit in with other women. A woman in the audience approached her afterwards and told her it sounded like a description of autism.
